This is actually a fun use of the Pi whether you run RetroFeed on it or not. After following these instructions, you'll wind up with a Pi that...
- Boots directly to a full-screen command line
- Displays that command line in a simplied, lo-res, "retro" style
- Uses, ideally, the composite video output connected to a CRT display. You're free, of course, to use a flatscreen monitor that has composite input, or--if you skip the composite steps--use the HDMI output with or without a VGA convertor, etc.
This is not an exact science. Be prepared to do a lot of fiddling and tweaking in order to get things looking right on your own CRT.
You'll be making a lot of tweaks to the base Rasperry Pi OS, so I'd recommend doing this with a fresh install on a dedicated SD card that you can swap out with the card containing your regular, day-to-day OS install.
Launch Raspberry Pi Imager and write to a new card with the options below. Most of these are on the "Advanced Options" screen, which you can reach by typing CTRL+SHIFT+X. (Some versions of the Imager show a "gear" icon once you pick an OS, and you can get to Advanced Options that way too.)
- Operating System: Raspberry Pi OS (other) -> Raspberry Pi OS Lite
- Really just about any Rasperry Pi OS will do, but since we won't be using the windowing system, we might as well leave it out and go with "Lite"
- I use the 32-bit version, but if your Pi supports it, feel free to opt for 64-bit. It shouldn't make a different for this project.
- Set a hostname. You'll use this hostname to log onto the Pi remotely via SSH later.
- Enable SSH with password authentication
- If you're familiar with public-key authentication and want to use that instead, be my guest.
- Select "Set username and password" and fill those in. You'll be using these along with the hostname to log on remotely, so remember what you pick.
- Configure wireless LAN with your local wi-fi network name and password. Set the country to your country code.
- Set your locale settings appropriately
Click "Save", make sure your SD card is selected under "Storage", then choose "Write" and wait.
When it's ready, pop it into your Pi and boot it up. The first boot may take a while and/or require reboots, and you might not see anything on a connected monitor when it's done.
Once the OS is installed and booted up, you may or may not be able to execute terminal commands directly on the Pi. (Maybe if you have an HDMI monitor attached, but probably not if you've already hooked up a composite monitor.) In any case, it's useful to log in from another computer that's on the same network.
Launch your favorite terminal program on the remote computer and enter:
With "username" and "hostname" being replaced with whatever you entered when configuring the SD card. (If this doesn't work, try it without .local on the end.)
When prompted for a password, use the password you picked earlier.
If asked some other questions during your first SSH connection to the Pi, answer "Y" or "Yes".
However you're getting to the command line, once you're there, make sure you're as up-to-date as you can be:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Note that the changes outlined below generally won't take effect until your next restart (
sudo shutdown -r noworsudo reboot).
Your Pi will need to send video using the composite output. On Raspberry Pi 3s and 4s, this uses the so-called "audio" port and requires a special cable or adapter. Pretty much any commercially-available cable with a tip-ring-ring-sleeve 1/8" (3.5mm) plug on one end and three 1/4" RCA plugs on the other should do the job. These can be found for under 10USD. If you get the kind that is designed for camcorders, they'll do the job, although they're wired a bit differently: The Pi's video signal will actually come out the "audio right" plug (which is usually red).
(If you're using a Pi 5, this is going to require a lot more work, as they don't have built-in composite output jacks.)
To switch on composite output, launch Raspi-Config from the command line:
sudo raspi-config
Go to "Display Options" and enable composite there. Your Pi will not be able to do both composite and HDMI and will probably require any HDMI cables to be unplugged before you'll get anything out of the composite output.
If you installed the "Lite" version of the OS, you should already be booting to the command line. If not, or if you forget to set auto login, go back into Raspi-Config, choose "System Option", then "Boot / Auto Login" to adjust things.
Your Pi should now correctly boot to a GUI-free command line, and you should (more or less) see it on your CRT. But it still looks like the stock Raspberry OS terminal, although perhaps in black and white (or amber, or green...) for those of us with monochrome monitors. Plus, it's very likely that the size is all wrong, with some sides cut off.
So a few more tweaks are in order. As before, if the current screen display makes it difficult/impossible to make these changes directly on the Pi, just ssh into it from another computer.
Consider making a backup copy of these configuration files prior to modifying them
Using your favorite text editor to modify the console-setup file used by the terminal program. Here's an example using nano:
sudo nano /etc/default/console-setup
Assign one of the following sets of values to FONTFACE and FONTSIZE
VGA(sizes 8x8, 8x14, 8x16, 16x28 and 16x32)Terminus(sizes 6x12, 8x14, 8x16, 10x20, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32)TerminusBold(sizes 8x14, 8x16, 10x20, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32)TerminusBoldVGA(sizes 8x14 and 8x16)Fixed(sizes 8x13, 8x14, 8x15, 8x16 and 8x18).
I think Terminus at 6x12 or 8x14 and Fixed at 8x13 look appropriately retro, but feel free to try the others. Example:
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="8x14"
In nano, type ctrl+O then return to save, and ctrl+X to exit.
To view your font changes without rebooting the entire system, use:
sudo /etc/init.d/console-setup.sh restart
Or reboot using sudo shutdown -r now or sudo reboot
Edit /boot/config.txt (don't forget to sudo) and add/modify/uncomment the lines below somewhere in it.
- The values for overscan_left/right/etc are just what worked for me. You'll probably wind up using different values, depending on your monitor. It can take a bit of experimentation. Positive numbers increase the size of the black border on the corresponding side, while negative numbers reduce it.
- For PAL monitors, change the value for
sdtv_modeto 2 - For color monitors (if you want to use color), omit
sdtv_disable_colorburst=1or set it to 0 - Full details on this file and its various options
overscan_left=34
overscan_right=30
overscan_top=-48
overscan_bottom=-10
sdtv_mode=0
sdtv_aspect=1
sdtv_disable_colorburst=1
enable_tvout=1
disable_overscan=0
overscan_scale=1
If you find that your overscan settings only seem to work at the beginning of the boot process, and get ignored about halfway though, use a # to comment out the line that enables the VC4 graphics driver:
#dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
(This line may have additional text after it, like ,composite or something. Comment it out anyway.)
The framebuffer size determines the number of virtual "pixels" used for the overall screen image, which in turn affects how many rows and columns of characters wind up getting displayed.
To start with at least, specify a width that is the width of the font you chose above multiplied by the number of columns you want. Do the same for font height and number of rows. Here, I'm using an 8x14 font and shooting for 24 rows of 40 columns, giving me a width of 8x40 and height of 14x24:
framebuffer_width=320
framebuffer_height=336
Edit /boot/cmdline.txt and add logo.nologo on the end. This will disable the "raspberries" graphic at the top of the screen.
The existing contents of your cmdline.txt may differ, but here's what mine looked like after the edit, as an example:
console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=deadbeef-42 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait logo.nologo
Everything in this file has to be on one line, so don't add any returns.
Edit ~/.bashrc to adjust your shell environment.
Since there are so few characters per line now, you might prefer a shorter default prompt. Either find the line that sets the PS1 environment variable and edit it, or just add a new line near the end of the file that reassigns it to whatever you like.
For example, this will just show the path and not the username and host. It also changes the $ at the end to a more retro >
PS1='\w> '
If your monitor is monochrome...
- Add a line to let the shell know
TERM=xterm-mono- This should go near the top of the file, before any existing part of the script checks the
$TERMvariable - If this line is in the file, comment it out:
force_color_prompt=yes- Find the section that checks for color support and aliases
lsandgrepto always use color. Either comment those lines out, or explicitly set the color to "none" like so: alias ls='ls --color=none'
The easiest and quickest way to get RetroFeed onto your Pi is probably to just pull down a ZIP file of the full repo from Git. From the terminal (or via ssh), navigate to the directory you want the RetroFeed directory to live in, then run this:
wget https://github.com/JeffJetton/retrofeed/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
Unzip the ZIP file, rename the resulting directory, and (optionally) delete the ZIP file:
unzip main.zip
mv retrofeed-main retrofeed
rm main.zip
If you have git installed on your Pi, you can of course just clone the repo that way.
If you've downloaded the files onto your primary computer (perhaps to write your own segment), you can selectively send them from there over to your Pi using scp:
scp [local file(s)] [pi username]@[pi hostname].local:~/retrofeed
The .local may or may not be necessary, depending on how you have things set up.
RetroTerm relies on Beautiful Soup for parsing HTML. As of Raspbery Pi OS "Bookworm", you'll need to use apt to add the Debian-packaged version of it to your system Python environment:
sudo apt install python3-bs4
(Installation via pip is still possible, but requires creating a virtual environment.)
Move into the retrofeed directory if you're not there already, then run the retrofeed.py Python script:
cd retrofeed
python retrofeed.py
If you're trying out the program on a Mac, you'll probably need to use
python3instead ofpython(assuming you haven't aliased it already).